Zora Neale Hurston achieved moderate success during the Harlem Renaissance as a short-story writer and a collector of black-American folklore. Her stories deserve attention beyond the concerns of black or feminist literature because of their local color and strong characterization. Hurston was the most prolific black-American woman writer of her time, but the significance of her contribution to American literature and folklore has only recently been acknowledged. She has been described by her biographer, Robert E. Hemenway, as "flamboyant and yet vulnerable, self-centered and yet kind, a Republican conservative and yet an early black nationalist." Her stories reflect this complexity.

No record of Hurston's birth exists, but, as she wrote in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), she "heard tell" she was born on 7 January 1903 in Eatonville, Florida, one of eight children. However, one brother gave 1891 as the year; another brother, Everette, was convinced by Hurston to...